Reaching 1000 caches (a few times) raised a number of questions that no one seemed to want to tackle, like how many were placed since caching started here, what percentage have been archived, what's the ratio of cache types over time, are we being overrun with micros, etc, etc?

So I PQ'd grnbrg's archived cache list (thanks) and then tried to add all the active caches in Manitoba into GSAK. Exported it into excel via csv and ran a bunch of pivot table queries and generated the following tables which people may find interesting (I know I did).

First archived caches. Naturally the older the cache the more likely it is to be archived but I was surprised that only 20% of caches placed since caching began in MB have been archived. The table below shows by year the cache was placed the percentage of active vs archived caches. Note that we are at 1290 total placed caches. I noticed that I seem a couple of caches light on the active count (1020 rather than 1022) so there may be a few errors but it should be pretty close.

By this point I was starting to wonder about cache density so I popped the data into a GIS and ran a kernel density grid analysis on 100 m resolution for Manitoba and 50 m in Winnipeg. Winnipeg's density was so much higher than every where else I had to show the Manitoba density as a standard deviation to have any other hotspots show up (a little over 400 of the active caches in MB are within the perimeter by the way). It gives you a good idea where the hot spots of caching are in the province.

Note that the Winnipeg area analysis uses the perimeter (roughly) as a cutoff but much of the high density caching unfiltered was carried to the northeast all the way to Bird's Hill PP.

Its pretty easy to see where there is room for more caches and where the density is already pretty high. The highest density spot is the UofM with over 10 caches/sq km.

One of the big issues of late is the perceived proliferation of micros. Are we really being overrun with the little buggers? Perhaps not, looks like small is the cache size of choice, followed by regular and micros coming in at third.

Last edited by Dragonfreys on Aug 16, 2008 9:01 pm; edited 2 times in total

I also looked at whether or not difficulty and terrain ratings were changing over the years and it seems a bit inconclusive on a cursory view. You can get the whole spreadsheet with all the various worksheets from here. Feel free to take it and massage out other stats that appear to support any number of viewpoints.

Quite the interesting. I may only be a newbie cacher still, but it's still quite informative. I KNEW we weren't being overrun with micros. As said elsewhere... like 90% of the micros are either Mayors or Conquistas (which tend to still indeed be fun for the most part).

Yeah, safe assumtion caches placed in winter will be less. Well... at least I'll be adding at least one in December (unless something else goes horribly wrong) :P. Possibly two, but we'll see.

But as someone else mentioned, these would be interesting to see on the main mbga page.

There is one problem though, many of the "micros" are listed as small caches.

This is true (if one goes by my definitions... that being that an altoids container is a micro). I asked on the geocaching.com board about that once, and the general consensus is that an altoids tin (regular size) was a small.

Bah... the first cache I'm putting out will be a 'small', but I could easily fit about 6-8 altoids tins INSIDE of it :P I say we lobby that Altoids tins be called micros

I would be interested in having this permanently available on our web site. Is this something you'd be willing to share there?

Actually they are already on the MBGA website in an album here. I do this type of work for a living so it really didn't take long. Took me longer to try to get the images posted properly while working around the idosyncrocies of IE7.

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